Regrets to Bangladesh

During his official visit to Dhaka, The President of Pakistan
Gen. Pervez Musharraf expressed regrets over the events of 1971, which
were no other than the excesses committed by the army on the civilian
population of what was then a part of Pakistan.

These excesses had been highlighted and commented upon in the report
of the Hamoodur Rahman Commission, which was released by the Musharraf
government sometime ago. Having made this authentic record public
Gen. Musharraf apparently thought it proper to express regrets over
what had happened.

While standing as an honoured guest on the site of the memorial for
those who perished in what the Bangladeshis call their war of
liberation it was an appropriate occasion for him to respond to a
long-standing demand of Bangladesh for an apology from
Pakistan—a demand which had acquired a sharper edge after the
publication of the Hamoodur Rahman Commission report.

The Bangladesh government has welcomed the expression of regrets by
Gen. Musharraf and is quite satisfied with it. The Awami League and
some other opposition groups are of course unhappy: they think it is
not enough because it falls short of an apology. Let us see the
difference between ‘apology and regret’. According to the
Oxford Dictionary an apology means “regretful acknowledgement of
an offence or failure”, and regret means, “a feeling of
sorrow or repentance or remorse”.

So the expression of regrets may imply an apologetic attitude but it
is not an apology per se. Leaving aside the question of semantics what
is important is that Gen. Musharraf is the first Pakistani ruler who
made a commendable gesture to allay a grievance by making a public
statement of regrets and what is even more important is that it has
been made by a ruler of Pakistan who also happens to be the chief of
the army, an institution which was held responsible for the 1971
excesses.

The statement in question as formulated bespeaks the caution and
reserve observed in consideration of any possible reaction because the
general public opinion in Pakistan, based as it is on certain false
perception and illusions were nurtured by our media on the emergence
of Bangladesh and have persisted ever since in one form or the
other. One of them is that it was the miscreants of the Awami League
who terrorized and intimidated people of East Pakistan to vote for the
Awami League secessionist programme of six Points in the 1970
elections, otherwise they were all for one Pakistan. Coupled with it
is the perception that the political discontent in East Pakistan was
due to the intrigue of the Hindu teachers.

But as Kunwar Idris has rightly pointed out in his article
‘Lessons from the Past’ (Dawn August 4, 2002). “The
time and events have proved wrong all these views and
assumptions. Bangladesh has not fallen under Indian hegemony nor is
any remorse felt there on breaking away from Pakistan.”

In any case, the protagonists of the theory of the intrigue of the
Hindu teachers have no answer to the question as to why the said
intrigue did not work in 1945-46 elections in which Pakistan was the
main issue and the Muslim League captured all the seats of the Central
Assembly and 113 out of a total of 119 seats of the provincial
assembly in Bengal. That was the time when Hindu teachers were there
in much larger numbers and in full force of their anti-Pakistan
activities. Even so, the Muslim Bengal gave a clear vote for Pakistan.

Why don’t we admit that something had gone wrong in the
intervening period of 25 years, which turned the tide in East Pakistan
and it gave an almost unanimous vote for secession in 1970 polls, in
spite of desperate efforts by Yahya Khan's martial law
administration to split the vote through Al-Shams and Al-Badar who
were heavily financed and supported in every possible way?

Kunwar Idris goes on to add: “Now almost 32 years after the
creation of Bangladesh, even the blustering patriots of that time
concede that had the power been transferred through the parliament to
the winning party, Pakistan would have stayed together, or at least
the bloodshed that accompanied the separation could have been
avoided.”

Yes, the bloodshed accompanying the separation could have been avoided
if the army was not in control. It is again an illusion that Yahya
Khan could transfer power to Mujib. There is also the question: was
Mujib prepared to accept it?

Safdar Mahmood has listed some of Mujib's statements in his book:
“Pakistan Divided” (Pages 72-72) which provide an
answer. On one occasion Mujib is reported to have said that the six
Points “charted a path where Bengalis had to break the bondage
of Pakistan”. Mujib also confessed in a TV interview with David
Frost that he had been “working for Bangladesh since
1948”. Mr. Sultan M. Khan, a former foreign secretary of
Pakistan, has disclosed in an article that during an RCD meeting in
Dhaka soon after the 1970 elections, foreign ministers of Turkey and
Iran called on Mujib, with our government's approval, and he told
them that he would “rather be the Founding Father of Bangladesh
than the Prime Minister of Pakistan”.

In this regard, I may perhaps record a personal memory also. I was
joint secretary of the central ministry of information in Dhaka, I met
Sh. Mujibur Rahman for the first time, at one of the British deputy
high commissioner's parties soon after the martial law of 1969. I
was introduced to him by Mr S.G.M. Budruddin, the then editor of the
Morning News, Dhaka. During the course of conversation Mr. Budruddin
said to Mujib that as a disciple of Mr Suhrawardy he had to rise to
the occasion and play his role, Folding his hands in an apologetic
manner, Mujib replied: “Budruddin Bhai, Suhrawardy Sahib was a
great man. He was an all-India leader of the Muslims, and later an
All-Pakistan leader. I am a very small man, I can only be a Bangladesh
leader”.

After the Awami League had swept the polls in 1970, Mujib is reported
to have said to many people, including Mr Budruddin: “Do you
think I can run this country on the basis of the numerical strength of
my party in the National Assembly with the Punjabi army and Punjabi
bureaucracy still around”?

And now something about the history of Pakistan with particular
reference to East-West relations in order to bring into focus the rise
of the secessionist movement in the eastern wing.

Pakistan was created as a single sovereign state with two zones; the
eastern and the western, but at no stage of its history as a single
country did the Bengali Muslim leaders fail to invoke the Lahore
Resolution which had visualized independent states in the
north-western and eastern zones of India. In the first provincial
elections in 1954 Moulvi Fazlul Haq and Mr H.S. Suhrawardy set up a
United Front and campaigned on the basis of a 21-point programme which
declared, inter alia, that “East Bengal will get complete
autonomy according to the Lahore Resolution.”

Again, during the framing of the 1956 constitution of which Suhrawardy
was one of the architects, most of the leaders of his party, the Awami
League, did invoke the Lahore Resolution, talked about a confederal
system and did lay a claim to maximum provincial autonomy for East
Pakistan inside the Constituent Assembly and outside.

Suhrawardy himself went along with the then Prime Minister Choudhry
Muhammad Ali, M.A. Gurmani and other Punjabi leaders to turn all of
West Pakistan into One Unit, in spite of the opposition from the small
provinces of Sindh, NWFP and Balochistan, and also agreed on the
principle of parity between East and West Pakistan in spite of East
Pakistan majority on the basis of population. Finally, the first point
in Shaikh Mujib-ur-Rehman's Six Points, which became Awami
League's “battle cry” during the 1970 elections
emphasized that the future constitution of Pakistan should provide for
a “federation of Pakistan in the true sense on the basis of the
Lahore Resolution.”

The Awami League won all the seats in East Pakistan except one from
where Nurul Amin was elected. But the Six-Point programme was not
acceptable to political and military leaders of West Pakistan.

The Awami League and its militant wing mounted a movement. The Bengali
civil servants and even the personnel of the army joined the
anti-government demonstrations. There were protracted negotiations
between Yahya Khan and Mujibur Rahman as also between West Pakistani
leaders Bhutto and others and Mujibur Rahman. But there was no
agreement and the Awami League, particularly its militant wing, went
on a course of rebellion. Eventually in March 1971 when General Yahya
Khan resorted to army action, the Bengali Muslims fought what they
call their “war of liberation.”

The Indian army intervened, Pakistan was dismembered and Bangladesh
emerged as a new and independent state—a free Muslim national
homeland in the eastern zone of India. Now, was it not in a way the
fulfilment of what had been envisaged in the Lahore Resolution of
1940? Does it not basically conform to the formula devised in 1940, by
our founding fathers, the leadership of All-India Muslim League?

We in Pakistan, sometime, refer to the civil war in East Pakistan
without going into its background and conveniently attribute the
emergence of Bangladesh to the Indian armed support. Let us, however,
pause and think. Was it the Indian armed support alone which was
responsible for Bangladesh's coming into being? Granted that it
was one of the decisive factors in the last phase of the civil war but
the civil war itself was the culmination of a long history of bitter
prejudices, and grievances of East Pakistanis against West
Pakistan's power elite based on feelings of deprivation and of
non-participation in running the affairs of the country in political,
economic and administrative fields. They felt that they were treated
like a colony whereas they were numerically the majority part of the
country.